


call off the wedding band

by WomanOf1000Faces



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: And the Consequences Thereof, F/M, Intercultural relationship, Surprise Marriage, Torchwood makes the mess and UNIT cleans it up, UNIT, UNIT has zero women for Sarah to vent to, aka his normal state of being, anyway Four and Sarah are literally space married thanks, but he tries and that's nice, clueless harry sullivan, kinda idiots in love, new series cameos, random Torchwood junk lying around, the brigadier is trying to cope
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26576821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WomanOf1000Faces/pseuds/WomanOf1000Faces
Summary: All Alastair wanted was a quiet afternoon with no disasters or alien incursions. Then the Doctor and Miss Smith showed up and announced they were married, and everything went to pieces from there.Sarah and the Doctor are each convinced that the other wants out of their marriage of convenience, but as usual, they'll have to prevent UNIT HQ from being completely demolished before they can do anything as sensible as talk about their respective feelings.
Relationships: Fourth Doctor/Sarah Jane Smith
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart had been enjoying that rare and precious thing, a quiet afternoon at UNIT headquarters, when the private came bursting into his office at top speed to tell him that the Doctor's blue TARDIS box had been spotted appearing in the laboratory wing. Upon receiving this news, Alastair was up from his desk chair in a moment, taking off at a dead run for the area indicated. The private, already winded, was barely able to keep up.

Ever since the Doctor had regenerated again, he'd been notoriously difficult to keep hold of, only darkening UNIT's door in the direst emergencies, and often only when called, at that. If he'd turned up of his own volition, it could only mean that something truly dreadful had happened or was about to, and it would behoove Alastair to find out what was going on as quickly as possible. Not to mention that the Doctor was still due a scolding for running off after the android incident and leaving UNIT to mop up, and Alastair had been rather looking forward to giving it.

He entered the room the red-faced private indicated, and spotted the TARDIS almost immediately. The Doctor was not in evidence, but before Alastair could investigate further, Miss Smith emerged from the ship, a trifle unsteady and with a peculiar expression on her face. That was all right then. If she was here, the Doctor was probably still about. He tended to not stray far from wherever she happened to be, except in emergencies.

"Ah, good afternoon, Miss Smith," Alastair greeted her, priding himself on acting as though she'd entered the room by much more conventional means. Then, because it seemed to need saying, "Are you quite well?"

Miss Smith startled slightly, as though she hadn't noticed him. "Oh, hello Brigadier. Yes, I'm quite all right." She looked as though she didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and so was avoiding either. "It's just that I seem to have married the Doctor."

At that moment, the man himself, complete with ridiculous scarf, poked his head out through the TARDIS doors, grinning cheerfully. "Oh, we're at UNIT. Hello, Brigadier."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left kudos or comments on the first installment! Feedback and love motivate me to keep posting.

Alastair had been a part of UNIT for several years now, and for some of those years his country and planet had been invaded by extraterrestrial creatures on a seemingly monthly basis. He liked to believe that, even though he had not been to as many planets as some people, he had seen a thing or two and was no longer easily shocked by the strange and surprising. He had maintained his composure in situations that would have sent some men whimpering for their mothers.

However, for once in his career he found himself encountering a shock that had his mind completely shutting down, momentarily going as blank as a freshly cleaned whiteboard. Miss Smith could not have just said she had married the Doctor, because she was never meant to say those words. Nobody in the whole continuum of time and space was meant to say those words. And Miss Smith certainly was not meant to announce out of the blue that she had married anybody, ever.

Alastair had maintained his sanity in an increasingly nonsensical world by clinging to some basic, fundamental ideas about the people surrounding him. The government was never going to give UNIT the credit it was due. Miss Smith was an essentially decent, if slightly snoopy, girl - hard-working, loyal, a good head on her shoulders. The Doctor was mad, but good in a crisis, and definitely not the sort to get married to anyone, ever.

For about five seconds, Alastair's brain shuddered to a halt as he attempted to account for this abrupt shift in his personal universe.

Then Dr. Sullivan came in behind him, evidently having heard who had shown up. "Why, Sarah, old thing," he exclaimed. "How have you been?"

"I'd be better if you remember that I'm neither old nor a thing," Miss Smith rejoined, although more wearily than usual.

Around this point, Alastair's brain decided to snap back into gear. Shock or no, he needed to get to the bottom of this. "Right, Doctor, it's a good thing you've turned up, I was just about to send for you. There's something I need you to take a look at. Sullivan, would you take Miss Smith and get her some tea."

As he spoke, he attempted to fix Sullivan with a look meant to communicate that this was not a request, and that there was shifty business needing to be looked into regarding Miss Smith. How to nonverbally impart the exact nature of said business was proving a puzzle, until the Doctor spoke. "All right, Brigadier, no need to get so high-handed. Harry, good to see you; keep Sarah out of trouble, won't you? If you misplace my wife I shall be very cross."

Sullivan's jaw dropped for a couple of gratifying seconds, then he seemed to collect himself. "Right ho, then. Come on, Sarah old girl." And he took Miss Smith's arm and departed.

....

To his great credit, Harry Sullivan managed to contain the hundred or so questions he was bursting with until they had gotten to the mess and he and Sarah Jane were seated, each with a steaming mug of army tea. Even then, he attempted to maintain a calm and casual demeanor. "So, good to have you back. How long has it been?"

Sarah Jane looked as though she were doing maths in her head. "Since the androids? Oh, I think it must've been three months or so, for the Doctor and me. It's hard to tell on the TARDIS, you know."

"Ah. Only been about six weeks here." Harry sipped his tea, cast about for another innocuous topic of conversation, gave it up as a bad job, and plunged ahead into the real question at hand. "So, the Doctor, he, er, said you were...that you two were..."

"Married? Yes, I suppose you weren't there when I told the Brigadier." Sarah Jane examined the stained tabletop between them. "Who, I suspect, had you bring me away so you could debrief me."

"I did rather get that feeling. But I won't tell him anything you don't want me to," Harry promised. "Or if you just want to drink your tea in silence, that's allowed too."

"No, I think I'd rather talk about it. I haven't exactly had the chance. It happened a few days ago, and... Well, I don’t quite know where to start."

"Now, just one thing, though," Harry said, forehead creasing. "When you say 'married', you don't mean on Earth, 'round here, at a register or a church or what have you, right? I mean, somebody here would've heard about it."

Sarah Jane laughed, a little ruefully. "No, it was sometime in the future, on a ship of some kind. The Papal Mainframe, they called it. We'd come by mistake - you know how it is - and they wanted me to stay and be a priestess there. Well, really, I didn’t have much choice about it, and it was all rather - remember that time we landed in the ancient Roman empire?”

Harry did remember, quite vividly. There had been a spot of bother involving some priestesses of Aphrodite who had been very insistent about him participating in a form of obeisance with them that involved rather fewer of his clothes than he preferred. “Ah, yes.”

Sarah grimaced, face coloring slightly. “Well, anyway, I’d said I didn’t want to, and they wouldn’t listen, but then the Doctor said if we got married, they wouldn’t be able to ordain me. So we did. It was quite similar to how people do it on Earth, I was surprised.”

“Oh.” Harry fished about for something to say that would bring Sarah back to normal instead of talking in that bright, brittle tone. “But, I mean to say, it’s not as though that sort of thing is official here and now, is it? Jolly good that it got you out of a spot of bother, of course, but it doesn’t have to mean anything, surely.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” Sarah Jane said, still in that tone and nodding at the tabletop rather than him. “I thought it all the way through the ceremony. And then - no, you’ll think I’m being silly.”

Harry reached across the table and patted her shoulder awkwardly. “That’s quite all right, old girl.” Dimly, as if from a long way off, a vague idea occurred to him that it must be rather sticky for Sarah Jane, being in a spot like this. That is to say, if he got into a spot of bother over a bird, there were plenty of chaps around the base who’d be only too happy to offer a commiseratory clap on the shoulder and a manful “Chin up” or two. Not to mention that if he was lucky enough to have a bird to get into a spot of bother over, it wasn’t likely to be top-secret enough to be confined to UNIT. Sarah Jane, on the other hand, didn’t exactly have a pick of sympathetic female ears about the place to take her woes to, and to his recollection she’d never been close with any of the few women working there. And if she told anyone outside of UNIT that she’d wound up married to an alien in the future, they’d probably section her.

“It’s just that,” Sarah Jane finally burst out, as if she could no longer contain herself, “they’re going along and we say all the words and then of course they say ‘You may now kiss the bride’. And for a moment I thought he wouldn’t, but he...he did, and it seemed like he really meant it, just at the time. And then we ran back to the TARDIS, business as usual, and I thought we were going to talk about it, but he just disappeared to go fiddle about with something and I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. I finally went to bed and then in the morning he acted as though nothing had happened. And he’s been like that ever since, except that every now and then he’ll just casually refer to me as his wife, and I don’t know what to do. I think I might go mad.”

“So you don’t know where you stand,” Harry summarized. He took a thoughtful sip of tea. “Why don’t you bring it up?”

Sarah Jane went rather red. “I don’t know if he’ll...say what I want him to say,” she mumbled into her own mug.

Harry considered this. Sarah Jane hadn’t actually specified what it was she wanted, but it stood to reason she was looking for reassurance that this whole marriage business wasn’t anything binding or permanent. After all, there was no way she could fancy the Doctor. He was, before anything else, an alien, and Sarah Jane just wasn’t the sort of nutter who fancied aliens. Besides which, she had probably been planning to leave off the traveling soon, get back to her work and her life on Earth.

“I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about,” he said bracingly. “The Doctor might be a bit mad, but he’s a decent chap. You tell him you want out of this business, I’m sure he’ll forget all about it and let you move on. After all, it wasn’t even on Earth, it can’t possibly, you know, mean anything.”

Sarah Jane, to his disappointment, did not look braced. “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” she said, still in that bright, brittle tone Harry didn’t know what to do with. “Silly of me to think any differently.”

“Exactly. After all, you’ve got a career here to think of; I’m sure he’ll understand you’ve got to get back to things.”

“What?” Sarah Jane looked rather surprised. “No, I’m not planning to stop traveling with him. That’s part of what I’m worried about, that he’ll want me to leave before I’m ready to.”

“Oh. I see.” He didn’t, not really, but maybe if he said he did things would start to make sense. 

For lack of anything else to do, his eyes fell on where Sarah Jane’s hands were twisted together on the tabletop. The fourth finger of her left hand bore a plain gold band (a wedding ring, his brain supplied), and she was turning it round and round on her finger absentmindedly.

....

Alastair had technically not told the whole truth. He did have something for the Doctor to take a look at, but there wasn’t actually anything that needed to be done to it. 

The thing was, that shifty snobbish Torchwood lot kept sending crates of different alien tech over to UNIT HQ for them to analyze and then send back. Alastair dutifully signed for each shipment, and then bundled it all into a disused shed over in an odd corner of the base, where it gathered dust until further notice. Torchwood did occasionally call to ask what had become of all their rubbish, but Alastair would on those occasions smugly inform the UNIT-Torchwood liaison (an ex-RAF man of some sort, who had an incorrigible habit of flirting incessantly over the phone) that nothing could be done about it, as his chief scientific advisor was on holiday. On occasions such as this, when the Doctor did come around and needed to be kept in one spot for a while, there was always something in the Torchwood shed that would provide a useful pretext and distraction.

The real business at hand was a serious interrogation. Unfortunately, this particular Doctor was rarely serious.

“So, Doctor,” Alastair began, once the fellow had his fingers well tangled in the wiring of the device (a teleporter of some sort) and couldn’t run away. “What’s all this about you and Miss Smith tying the knot?”

“Hm?” The Doctor looked up, puzzled, then grinned. “Ah, yes. We had a little spot of bother with the Papal Mainframe. They wanted to keep Sarah, you see, and she didn’t want to be kept. So I had to get them to marry us instead, and that sorted everything out, and here we are.”

“I see. This Papal Mainframe, are they some other species? Likely to try and invade?”

“Oh, no, no, they’re quite human. Well, mostly. A very long ways in your future, you see. It all gets a bit mixed around.”

Alastair’s mind started tiptoeing down a trail of thought populated by, among other things, some rather hideous human-Axon hybrids, and he yanked it back forcefully. “So the situation with Miss Smith was purely an emergency measure, then? No need for me to have her debriefed or anything?”

“If you’d really believed you wouldn’t need to debrief Sarah, Brigadier, you wouldn’t have sent her off to be quizzed by Harry,” the Doctor said, attention on the probably-teleporter.

Alastair chose to ignore that comment. “Miss Smith seemed to be under the impression that it was all rather more permanent than a momentary escape tactic.”

“Well, you can’t really blame her for that. We haven’t exactly had the opportunity to talk about it, running about here and there ever since. And then we turn up here and you send her off and get me poking about at a lot of scrap - tell me, what did you say needed to be done to this?”

He hadn’t said, just stood back while the Doctor pulled out a sonic screwdriver and got to work. “I should think it would be a weight off her mind to have it all straightened out once and for all,” he said firmly. “After all, Miss Smith is a bright girl with a promising career ahead of her if she ever comes back to it. She would probably be relieved to know that she isn’t bound to carry on traveling indefinitely.”

“Of course,” the Doctor muttered absently, “wouldn’t want to tie Sarah down to anything. She’ll want to leave eventually; they always do.”

There was more than a trace of sadness in his voice, and Alastair found himself suddenly remembering the previous Doctor and the long weeks of bad moods and low spirits that had resulted when Miss Grant left quite abruptly to marry that scientist chap. The day that Miss Smith chose to move on for good would likely be a day when Alastair would be happy to stay out of this Doctor’s path. The pair of them had grown quite close, he reflected, since the incident with Kettlewell’s robot. Sullivan had commented on it once, and Sullivan was hardly the most observant of fellows when it came to interpersonal relations.

“She’s quite a good girl, is Sarah Jane,” the Doctor went on, although he appeared to be talking to himself. “Always just what I need. Brave even when she’s frightened. Kind even when she’s completely out of her depth. Always seeing the things I’ve overlooked - for example,” and at this he turned to look sharply at Alastair, “if she were here, she’d have gotten me to ask why you’ve got me interfering with a perfectly functional vortex manipulator.”

Alastair was, fortunately, spared from coming up with a convincing response by the sudden blaring of the lockdown alarm. The radio at his belt began crackling urgently. He snatched at it and held it to his ear. “What’s going on?”

Benton’s voice, corrupted with static, came over the other end. “It’s the Torchwood shed, sir. There are these...portals that keep opening and closing all around it, and they’re starting to spread from there. It seems completely random.” A scream ending in a thud sounded in the background. “We can’t contain it, and even if we could get close enough to lay charges, we don’t know what effect 

blowing that shed up might have.”

Alastair swore under his breath, then again much more loudly as a wildly improbable hole in space, crackling with blue energy around the edges, opened without warning in the middle of the laboratory, with a view of one of the barracks (a good quarter mile away) on the other side. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but not before the Doctor had seen it too, and shoved the partly-disassembled vortex manipulator as far away from himself as he could. 

“Brigadier, you might have warned me that that was slaved to another manipulator somewhere around here,” he barked.

“How in blazes would I be expected to know that?” Alastair demanded. “Is that what’s causing the portals?”

“Yes, probably interacting with a third naughty little bit of technology you’ve got squirreled away in that shed. I’ve been meaning to take that whole lot off your hands, and now it seems I’ll have to. Come on, we’ve got to find Sarah.”

“We should get to the storage shed before things get worse. Miss Smith will be all right. Dr. Sullivan will look after her,” Alastair insisted. Apropos of nothing, his eye suddenly caught and fixed on something gleaming on the Doctor’s gesticulating left hand. It was something gold - a ring, he realized, on the fourth finger. Rather plain and unassuming, but a ring nonetheless. His soldier-brain tucked it away to deal with later.

“A jar of mustard would do a better job of looking after Sarah than Harry would!” the Doctor shouted. “Now what’s the quickest way to the mess hall, or wherever he’s taken her off to?”

....

The blaring alarms and the screaming warned Sarah that something was wrong before anything else, and when the first portal opened in the floor, she jumped to her feet and started heading out of the mess hall. Harry seized hold of her sleeve as she passed him, trying to pull her back. “Hang on, now, old girl. You can’t just go running out there like that. Anything could happen to you.”  
  


“Maybe it could. But I’d rather have it happen to me with the Doctor nearby than sitting around waiting here,” Sarah insisted, trying to tug her arm out of Harry’s grip.

“The Doctor would want you to be out of harm’s way,” he tried to argue. It didn’t do him much good.

“Well, he’s certainly not going to stay out of harm’s way, and he’s absolute rubbish at looking after himself, so I’m just going to have to be there to remind him.” Sarah gave a mighty yank and freed herself. She made for the door again, Harry right behind her. “You can come with me if you want, or you can stick here, but I’m going to find him and you’re not going to be able to stop me.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! I live!
> 
> Apologies for the delay in updating - RL writing has been kicking me in the pants for a few months, but Christmas vacation is the perfect time to catch up on fanfiction. The final chapter should not have nearly as long a delay.

The Doctor pounded along the corridors of the UNIT base, scarf flapping slightly behind him, eyes peeled for the faint blue sparking that signaled the imminent appearance of another portal. Quite aside from the potential danger of falling through one of those things, he simply didn’t have time to get transported halfway across the base by accident - unless it took him closer to where Sarah and Harry were holed up, but that was by no means guaranteed.

He was well aware that if Sarah had gotten caught in a portal, she could have ended up anywhere and he wouldn’t know about it, but since he wouldn’t actually know till he got to where she was supposed to be, he couldn’t let himself worry about it. Not worrying about it was also a useful way to not think about the possibility of only  _ part _ of Sarah getting caught in a portal. As he and the Brigadier whipped around a corner, they had to screech to a halt to avoid a private falling from a portal near the ceiling. The private hit the concrete floor, but the portal snapped shut before the hand holding his gun could pass through, leaving the man with a neatly cauterized stump.

On a good day, a day when Sarah was within arm’s reach or staying put in a place he knew she would be safe, the Doctor might have stopped to check the private over and ask him a few questions about what the portal had been like. Under the circumstances, he kept running, vaulting over a new portal that briefly opened in the floor, the Brigadier right behind him. Nobody on this base would be all right for long anyway, unless they got the larger problem under control. And the Doctor wasn’t going to do a thing about that until he knew exactly where his Sarah was.

If the Brigadier didn’t like that, he shouldn’t have sent her away with Harry for reasons the Doctor still didn’t grasp. 

He was trying to work out in his head what might be going on, just to save time, but it wasn’t working. All he could see were memories of Sarah in cryosleep on Space Station Nerva, Sarah tortured by Styre’s experiments, Sarah blinded on Karn and afraid, Sarah nearly infected by a Krynoid pod. The memories were bad enough; when they were happening it had hurt him more than he cared to admit to anyone.

The Doctor was aware that Sarah was an intelligent, brave, and capable woman - he would never have had her travel with him if she were anything less. The fact remained, however, that she was also extremely jeopardy-friendly, and the life they led offered more than their fair share of jeopardy to be friendly with. It was why, when Sarah wanted to leave (as the Brigadier had reminded him she would want to do sooner or later), he would let her go without a murmur. 

But that day, when it came, would hurt him, and who could blame him for wanting to put it off a little while longer? At the time, on the Papal Mainframe, marrying Sarah even for the sake of an escape had seemed like a plan that would give him that extra time. Humans, when they married, were typically planning to stick together for awhile, even if it didn’t work out that way. But the more he thought about it, and the longer Sarah went without saying anything, the more the Doctor couldn’t help worrying that the whole mess had had the opposite effect. He’d inadvertently reminded Sarah of the life she wasn’t having on Earth, and now she would want to leave him and go find that life.

He just needed to make sure she was alive and relatively untraumatized to be able to do so.

....

Sarah Jane ducked under a large egg-shaped portal hovering in midair, leapt over another one a few yards further on, felt a twinge in her ankle as she landed badly, and uttered a few choice Morestran swear words the Doctor had taught her. The swearing was cut off in a yelp as Harry’s arm slammed her into a nearby wall, just in time to avoid a third portal sparking open right where she’d been standing.

“Thanks, Harry,” she managed, once she’d gotten her breath back. 

“Don’t mention it, old girl.” Harry released her and dusted himself awkwardly. “You know, we could have just stayed put and waited for the Doctor to sort all this out. There would have been less running involved.”

“You hang around the Doctor, you get used to the running,” Sarah Jane informed him. “And I’m wearing heels, so if anyone should be complaining, it’s me.”

She took off at a light jog again, with Harry close behind. “Why do you keep wearing the things, then? None of my business, of course, but I’d think you’d wear - I don’t know, what do girls wear to run around in?”

Sarah Jane resisted the urge to sigh wearily - she needed the breath for more important things. “I wear the heels, Harry, because the Doctor is six and a half feet tall. And sometimes, when you’re living with the Doctor, you really do need any ground you can gain on him in the height department.”

Another portal opened a couple of feet off the ground, and they both swerved to avoid it. Through it, Sarah Jane could see crumpled bodies of a few UNIT soldiers, looking as though they had fallen from a great height unexpectedly. She couldn’t see if any of them were the Brigadier, but she hoped they weren’t. She tried not to think about what the Doctor would look like, crumpled on the ground like that.

So many times before, she’d thought she lost him for good - launching the rocket on Space Station Nerva, shot by Styre, electrocuted by the Zygons’ communications system. She’d wept over his body at Scarman’s estate, in the Space Defense Station, on Karn. She knew exactly what she would feel if he died, and feeling it for those few moments had been terrible enough; feeling it for the rest of her life didn’t bear thinking about. 

Especially when she didn’t yet know whether she would technically be left a widow or not. 

She’d never thought of being in love with the Doctor, as such, until he’d turned to her that day on the Papal Mainframe and casually suggested they get married. The Doctor just wasn’t someone that a woman like her was supposed to fall in love with, or even think of in that sense. He wasn’t human, he had no roots or stability, he was eccentric and brash and...just operated on a completely different level from everyone else, and therefore would never, ever love her back. And then he’d turned around and married her (she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to take off the ring) and kissed her like she was something precious, and then said nothing more about it.

She hadn’t wanted to make him explain, but Harry had been right about one thing - she needed to bring it up. The Doctor owed her some answers, and he was not allowed to die before she got them from him. He just wasn’t.

....

Alastair was going to murder whatever Torchwood minion had sent them the vortex manipulators, and that was all there was to it.

He wouldn’t do it himself, necessarily - there were plenty of alien invasions where some unsuspecting idiot could suddenly find himself in deadly peril. The details didn’t matter right at this moment. The important point was that as soon as he found out who was responsible for this fiasco, that person’s life expectancy would dramatically shorten. 

The Doctor would probably disapprove, but the Doctor was barely around anymore, and at the moment too preoccupied to suspect Alastair of deadly intent.

A voice in the side corridor they were just about to pass called out, “Doctor!”, and the man thus addressed very nearly skidded to a halt and made a hard left turn before Alastair had time to process that the voice belonged to a woman, namely Miss Smith. He turned about himself, albeit more slowly, just in time to spot Miss Smith running towards the Doctor. She was rather dusty and her dress somewhat mussed, but otherwise she did not look noticeably the worse for wear. Alastair only had seconds to register all this because in that time she and the Doctor had met midway down the corridor, and at that point Alastair had something else to think about entirely.

He’d seen the Doctor (in more than one body) be...affectionate, for lack of a better term, towards his companions on occasion. Miss Grant was a particular example of this. None of those moments were anything like what he now witnessed as Miss Smith buried herself in the Doctor’s coat, with the Doctor’s long arms wrapping around her and holding her close to him as if afraid she would disappear. He was whispering some comforting litany into the shaking woman’s hair, and although the Doctor was usually terrible at comforting people, it seemed to be effective in this instance.

Alastair could see further than his nose, and he’d seen enough of what had just happened to draw some conclusions. Despite the Doctor’s attempts to describe matters otherwise, it was clear that he thought more of Miss Smith than he would an ordinary companion. Alastair wasn’t quite prepared to believe that he thought so much of her as to marry her, but there was certainly something afoot - on both sides, if he’d read Miss Smith’s face rightly just now. Even Sullivan, watching from the other end of the corridor, seemed to have some idea, and if Sullivan could see it then it really was obvious.

....

The Doctor was well aware that both the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan were watching him, and couldn’t manage to care. Sarah was here with him and alive and, if not safe, at least unscathed. There was a crisis happening, yes, and he would deal with it shortly, but for the moment he needed to hold her close to him, to reassure himself that she was, in fact, all right. 

Had any other Time Lords been around, they would doubtless have called him ridiculous for showering so much emotion on a human instead of maintaining the focus befitting their kind. Well, he’d never been very good at what was befitting a Time Lord, and in this body he’d been worse than ever.

And Sarah Jane Smith wasn’t just any human either.

At length, she looked up at him, confusion in her eyes. “Doctor, what are you doing down here? As far as Harry and I could tell, whatever’s causing this is clear at the other end of the base.”

“Well, I wanted to make sure you were all right,” the Doctor told her, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Not to criticize, Sarah, but you do have a tendency to attract trouble wherever we go.”

“I attract trouble! Do you have any idea how many times I’ve thought you were dead or--” Sarah Jane cut herself off abruptly, as if she’d said more than she’d intended to.

Behind him, the Brigadier cleared his throat. “Right, now that that’s been sorted out... Doctor, do you have any kind of plan for how to fix this situation before the whole base gets torn apart?”   
  


The Doctor released Sarah Jane (ignoring the sudden cold her absence brought, which shouldn’t have been possible given that he was wearing a heavy coat and scarf) and turned to face the Brigadier. “Possibly. I’ll need to get a closer look at the epicenter of all this and take some readings - we’re going to have to run again.”

At that moment, a portal roughly the diameter of a subway car opened up barely two feet from where Sarah Jane was standing. He pulled her away from it and behind him automatically, then realized what was on the other side: the Torchwood shed. 

The Doctor had never been inside the Torchwood shed; the Brigadier and others in nominal authority wanted him to deal with whatever was stored in there, so he’d avoided it as a matter of principle. But he knew what the building looked like regardless, and even if he hadn’t, it would’ve been obvious on account of the dizzying concentration of opening and closing portals clustered all around it.

“Then again, we might not have to run,” he called over the crackling hum of the portal. He backed up slightly, ready to leap through, only to find Sarah’s hand wrapped around his.

“What?” he queried, as gently as he could muster.

“I’m going with you,” Sarah said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “I just found you; I can’t watch you go running off into danger again.”

“It’s not safe,” the Doctor pointed out, knowing as he did so that that wasn’t going to make a difference and wishing rather more than usual that it would.

Sarah’s only answer was to grip his hand tighter. They couldn’t waste any more time; the portal might close at any moment.

The Brigadier was saying, “Miss Smith, I think you’d better -”, but whatever he would’ve gone on to say was lost. The Doctor took a running leap, Sarah beside him, tumbling through the portal just before it fizzed closed behind them.

....

The portal travel and sudden adjustment in gravity direction had made her head spin, and the ungraceful landing hadn’t helped, so it took Sarah Jane a moment to realize that the warm, solid thing she’d landed on was the Doctor. Further investigation determined that he’d evidently wrapped himself around her as they hit the ground, protecting her. That, combined with the blinding, reassuring grin he threw her as she scrambled off him and to her feet, was really more than she should have to put up with in her current state of mental jumblement. It took all the resolve she possessed to not snog him then and there - maybe she should do it anyway, to keep him from getting any mad, risky ideas.

He had her hand in his once again before she could decide either way, pulling her further from the shed and the worst of the portal concentration. Then he darted back, and it was a few minutes before he returned to her, screwdriver in hand and a grim expression on his face. 

“The vortex manipulator the Brigadier had me taking apart earlier is slaved to an intact one in there,” he explained, gesturing at the shed, “and given these readings I’d say it got tangled up with a dimensional shift bomb until they both went haywire. I can’t get inside to detangle the problem, but I should be able to get close enough for long enough to plant some of these.” He pulled something small and squarish out of his coat pocket that Sarah Jane recognized as one of UNIT’s favorite types of explosives. 

“You’re going to blow the place up?” she asked, not because she didn’t know, but because she retained the (admittedly improbable) hope that someday these sorts of questions would make the Doctor realize just how foolhardy he was being and cause him to think of another option. “But you could be killed!”

Today was not going to be that day. “Nonsense,” the Doctor said carelessly. “The charges have a ten-second timer on them, plenty of time for me to get clear. Besides, it’s not as though anybody else is going to try.”

He was holding the explosive in his left hand, and Sarah Jane could see the plain gold band from their wedding still on his finger. Probably it was only still there because he hadn’t remembered to take it off, but she couldn’t help hoping it meant something else. Being allowed to stay, and no more dying, and maybe even love, although that felt like almost too much to ask for.

“Just don’t die, Doctor, please,” was all she could manage to say, and then before she could think about it, kissed him - lightning-fast, but hard and insistent that he live.

When she let him go, it was almost as though a thousand rapid-fire calculations shot through the Doctor’s mind, before he at last arrived at a hypothesis he liked, and a smile brighter than the sun spread across his face. “Well, in that case, I’ll certainly try my best.” And then he was gone, running away.

Sarah Jane turned away at first, squeezing her eyes shut, not wanting to watch. But then the thought came to her that this could be the last she saw of the Doctor, and she was by no means going to miss it, so she dared to look anyway, just in time to see the Doctor sprinting away from the shed, charges set, scarf flying, dodging portals here and there. He was going to make it -

\- and then the shed exploded into a multicolored fireball, the portals disappearing in a shockwave that didn’t quite reach as far as her hiding place - 

\- but which caught the Doctor in mid-stride, disappearing him into thin air.

He wasn’t disintegrated, or atomized. He just wasn’t there.

Sarah Jane had approximately two seconds to panic before a shadow fell over her, and she looked up to see the Doctor falling from about twenty feet above her. He landed front-first with a sickening thud just in front of her, and didn’t move.

It was just like every single time she’d thought he was dead, except that this was worse, because this time he was  _ hers _ , on some undefined level that he hadn’t been before, and she’d kissed him and it hadn’t ruined everything, it had been a good thing, and now he was crumpled on the ground and unmoving even when she turned him onto his back, and seeing him like this never failed to turn her into a sobbing mess and it wasn’t going to stop now.

There were running footsteps behind her, and then the Brigadier was standing by the Doctor’s head and Harry was trying to pull her up from where she was crying on the Doctor’s chest, and she didn’t want to be pulled. This was always the part where the Doctor would sit up suddenly and call someone an idiot, or gently prod her and tell her she was soaking his shirt, and everything would be all right again.

But this time Harry carefully moved her away and crouched down over the Doctor himself, checking for a pulse, for injuries.

“He’s alive,” he said, long seconds later, “just unconscious. Probably has a nasty concussion, poor fellow - I saw that fall and it couldn’t have been fun. We’d better get him to the sick bay, but he’ll be all right in the end, old girl, don’t you worry.”

“If memory serves,” the Brigadier commented dryly, “merely being put in the sick bay will cause the Doctor to be instantly up and on his feet again, skipping rope and tying people up in cupboards.”

....

The UNIT medical staff naturally let Harry in to accompany the Doctor, as he was one of them, and the Brigadier was able to gain entrance as well, being in charge. Sarah Jane, however, found herself ignominiously shut out.

“Rules are only staff and next of kin allowed in here,” a rather dour-looking nurse informed her. “The Brig gets an exception, but no one else.”

Sarah Jane reminded herself that losing her temper would do no one any good. “I’m not anyone else,” she informed the nurse firmly. “That man is my husband, and I want to know how he is.”

The nurse looked as though she seriously doubted this. “I’m not letting you in, but I’ll see that someone comes and updates you on his condition as soon as there’s any word.”

If given the chance, Sarah Jane would have protested this, but the nurse shut the door in her face, and she was forced to find some other spot to wait.


End file.
